Pristina's new mayor, Shpend Ahmeti, in one of the Kosovan capital's multitude of illegal buildings. Photograph: Andrew Testa/Panos Pictures

When the phone rings in the Pristina mayor's office, it usually means there's either a crisis brewing or an old crisis worsening. And the phone rings all the time.

Shpend Ahmeti has been in office less than five months, and has spent most of that time with his mobile phone clamped to one ear, fighting fires – mostly figurative but occasionally literal.

The burly Harvard-trained economist is attempting to bring rational, clean governance to the most corrupt city of one of the most corrupt countries in Europe, making him arguably the bravest mayor on the continent. An apparent assassination plot against him was recently uncovered: the five would-be hitmen were allegedly overheard divvying up grenades and assault weapons for the job. All but one are still at large and every day Ahmeti makes powerful new enemies.

"There were discussions in a restaurant, and weapons were exchanged," he said. The police have kept him in the dark but assured him it could not have been a very serious plot because officers had not known about it – a somewhat inverted logic that brought little comfort. "We took our own security measures," Ahmeti, 36, said with a shrug as if to concede those measures did not add up to much.

If such measures exist at all, they are hard to spot. One of his first acts in office was to auction off his predecessor's luxury official car, an Audi Q7. He now takes the bus into work each morning and uses one of the city hall's silver compact Hyundais to get to meetings. Often he just walks through the city's teeming streets, being accosted with praise, blame or petitions every few yards.

Even Ahmeti's surrender of his €25,000 limousine has generated ire. Another city mayor has followed his example but that has only heightened the unease of officials still enjoying expensive rides.

Connections

On a recent day the embattled Pristina mayor spent with the Guardian, the most pressing crisis was rubbish. The director of the Pristina landfill had closed its gates to the city's rubbish trucks on the grounds that the capital's public waste management company owed him money. That was true, but it has been true for 14 years and the landfill only shut once Ahmeti had taken office and national elections, due next month, began to loom on the horizon.

The mayor is a member of a protest group turned upstart party called Vetëvendosje ("self-determination"), while the landfill director is the brother of a powerful member of the ruling Democratic Party of Kosovo (PDK) who is close to the prime minister, Hashim Thaçi. The PDK man's brother-in-law runs the water management company, which has also started to squeeze the city, with daytime cuts in the water supply of up to eight hours, despite recent torrential rains.

Whether intentional or not, both moves make Ahmeti and his party look bad before the June polls, with the waste crisis by far the most pressing. Ahmeti sent Pristina's rubbish trucks 25 miles north to a landfill in Mitrovica. It was a temporary solution, as the problem was likely to spread north because of the links between waste disposal bosses. In a series of urgent phone calls, Ahmeti raised the stakes. If the lockout was not stopped immediately, he would tell the capital's refuse workers to empty their trash in front of ministerial buildings.

"It's a typical example of how nepotism, cronyism and corruption has taken over this place," Ahmeti, a former World Bank economist, said. "You can never close down a landfill. It's a public health issue. So I'm threatening them if they don't open up I'm putting the garbage in front of the government. I will really spill it in their backyard so they do something about it."

The threat had rapid results, with police being dispatched to the Pristina landfill to force open the gates. The round went to Ahmeti, but in the bare-knuckle world of Kosovo politics, there is almost always another round, some act of revenge waiting in the wings.

Another of the many battles involves an alleged fuel scam in Pristina schools. His office claimed that instead of supplying diesel at €1.20 a litre for the furnaces used to heat 43 Pristina schools, the local contractor was selling cheap heating oil smuggled from Serbia, worth just 50 cents a litre, and pocketing the difference. It meant the schools were getting fuel with sulphur emissions 70 times over the EU and Kosovan legal limit. Ahmeti shut the schools and ended the contract, and is now being sued for "reputational damage" by the company, which said the fuel had been switched after delivery to the schools' storage tanks.

But more absurd claims have succeeded in Kosovo's courts, and the company is well connected – a major funder of the two main political parties, the PDK and the opposition Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK).

Another battlefield

With legal challenges brewing and that day's rubbish somewhere on the road between the capital and Mitrovica, Ahmeti drove to yet another battlefield, potentially a decisive one.

Since the 1999 Nato intervention that ended the Kosovo war and paved the way for the declaration of independence in 2008, there has been a construction free-for-all in Pristina. Multi-storey buildings have shot up, most without permits or with fraudulent permits bought from a corrupted city planning department. Some stand on unsteady ground, others protrude on to streets or jostle so close to other buildings their neighbours sometimes wake up one morning and find they are no longer able to open their windows.

Ahmeti is taking down the buildings one by one, and in so doing has deliberately struck at the heart of the black economy. "Organised crime is by far mostly linked to construction, whether it is money laundering, nepotism or corruption," the mayor said. "All these bad things are at their worst in construction … So it was a priority to say, here is a sign of rule of law."

The beginnings of an illegal building in Pristina blocked by Ahmeti. Photograph: Andrew Testa/Panos Pictures

Ahmeti is unfazed. On a visit to a half-built eight-storey block of flats that had been built on a falsified permit and was targeted for demolition, he tramped up the rough concrete steps pursued by the investor, who happened to be one of his former economics students. The investor pleaded with him to let the building stand, promising to build a kindergarten on the ground floor. The mayor seemed unimpressed and disappointed in his protege.

Asked about the allegations of a dodgy permit, the investor said: "Up to some point, that's correct. We took our chances. I suppose I was a good student but not such a good practitioner."

In the meantime, however, demolition work had halted. All 10 of the city's building inspectors had been suspended while under investigation for selling permits, and an inspector must be on site for a demolition. Furthermore, Ahmeti had found that the last administration had given a private firm a lucrative contract to carry out any demolitions, even though a publicly owned company already existed that could have done the work free. The private firm, it turned out, did not even have the required equipment but had to lease it from the public company.

Support from west

The coils of corruption envelop the city every way the mayor turns. He and his young team face daunting odds. He has been able to fill only 15 posts in a 700-strong administration. The rest are civil servants put there during 14 years of LDK rule, not many of them on grounds of competence, and they have solid job protection. Ahmeti has found himself in the middle of a dense and dangerous jungle with only a nail-file to cut his way out.

He said his greatest disappointment had been the limited support from the west. The EU has had a "rule of law" mission called Eulex in Kosovo since 2009, but Ahmeti and many other Kosovan critics say it is constrained by timidity in European capitals when it comes to following the corruption trail to the doors of top politicians.

"If you are a politician sitting in Brussels or Berlin and suddenly Eulex tells you that there is this evidence that could indict [a very senior politician] who is in talks with Serbia, what do you do?" Ahmeti said. "You need them for the dialogue or else it doesn't work. So you call Eulex and you say: 'Can you delay this because we don't need an arrest now for political instability.'"

Ahmeti and his party are criticised in turn by western diplomats for their alleged refusal to make compromises with Serbia in the interests of maintaining peace. And Pristina citizens will judge him more on how he can rectify past faults than for simply bringing them to light.

"The new mayor has done quite a bit to root out bureaucracy, irregularities and corruption particularly in construction permits," said Valmir Ismaili, of the Kosovo Democratic Institute. "Nevertheless, [he] is dealing much more with the wrongdoings of the former mayor rather than focusing on achieving his promises."

Those expectations include better public transport, better water supply and the completion of the half-finished infrastructure: a tall order in the circumstances. His friends and supporters hope he will eventually be a model for a new, younger breed of Kosovan politicians, just as long as he manages to stay alive. One said: "I worry that he is being naive and has not quite understood the seriousness of the forces he is up against."